Review
I CLAUDIA
Directed by Chris Abraham, Canada 2004
I wanted very much to like I Claudia. It takes an original approach to low-budget filmmaking, adapting Kristen Thomson’s one-woman play into a one-woman film with an absolute minimum of cinematic fuss.
But stage and screen are very different media, and devices that may be effectively dramatic in the intimacy of a small theatre do not always work on the large screen or on the impersonal small tube.
This story of a troubled pre-adolescent girl’s relationship with her father, prospective stepmother and schoolmates is told by first-person narration direct to the camera. It relies less on script than on the interplay of four voices, including the young Claudia, her grandfather, her aspiring stepmother, and the school janitor, all played by Kristen Thomson.
Instead of relying on elaborate makeup, Thompson wears stylized facemasks, covering all but her mouth and lower jaw, and uses costume changes and different voices to differentiate the four characters. This aspect of the film is very effective, as are two rather clever puppet sequences illustrating a mock-Eastern European folk tale.
But against this, the film has two big failings. First, though possibly less important, is the dialogue. Unoriginal but serviceable, it delivers characters closer to cliché than caricature and it is by turns cloying and irritating.
What really gets me is that no one seems to have given any thought to how poorly the central device of the mask, doubtless very effective when the performer is standing 10 to 20 feet away from her audience, transfers to the screen. Watching an immobile face for 75 minutes, with most of that in close-up shots, is an estranging experience. And since the mask forces the viewers’ attention to the only moving part of the face – the mouth – within the first 10
minutes I was compelled to observe that a 40-year-old’s teeth look really creepy in the mouth of a 13-year-old.
Still, given the immense difficulty of making real feature films in English-speaking Canada, this was a brave effort and I assume that it is on that basis I Claudia won a place in Canada’s Top 10 of 2004. Well, that and the fact that Guy Maddin and Quebec (where your tax dollars are occasionally wasted on better causes) can only produce so much. |
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